The Blood Star (22 page)

“The water is full of sharks, Lord! By the
gods, have you not seen them? I feel their teeth in my flesh
already! Kill me yourself if you must, but—“

For the first time in all the years we had
been together, I struck Kephalos. Hard, full in the face. He was so
surprised he forgot even to be afraid.

“Do not be such a coward as to open your arms
to death, fool! If your belly is ripped open by a shark or by a
sword, mine or another’s, it comes to the same thing. When I tell
you, jump!”

There were tears in his eyes. He looked so
bewildered I knew not what he would do, but I owed him this one
chance. Even if he did not choose to take it.

I turned away from him, for the pirate ship
was closing on us fast. I went to join the sailors and found them
arguing among themselves over the wisdom of surrender. It seemed to
be two against one in favor.

“The worst life is better than the best
death,” one of them said, even as he threw his sword in the
water.

Another, a narrow-shouldered man with pale
eyes, said “yes, yes” several times. He seemed excited almost to
the pitch of madness.

“Perhaps they will let us join them, but in
any case a slave always lives in hope of escape.”

“Escape to where? To that?”

This, followed by a gesture toward the shore,
full of contempt and hopelessness—what had I done but to condemn
Kephalos to a slow death by drought and hunger?

“There is only the desert, the sea, the
pirates—or death,” he went on. It was the sailor who had spoken of
Egypt, where a man might die content. “I choose death. It comes to
the same.”

“Then choose death. Now!”

The pale-eyed man stabbed him, pushing his
point in under the rib cage. His victim cried out and clutched at
the sword that pierced his belly, so that his hands were cut
through to the bone when the pale-eyed man pulled it loose. Thus he
died.

Why? I wondered. Perhaps he did not even know
himself. Men do strange and bitter things when fear seizes
them.

I too was afraid, and suddenly full of rage.
The pale-eyed man turned to me—the gods alone will ever know what
was in his heart—and I raised my arm and struck, so that my blade
bit halfway through his neck and he fell at my feet, twitching
wildly and spraying blood everywhere.

Good. Let him die, I thought. I have done him
a service.

The other man, the last of the crew still
alive, his sword at the bottom of the sea, fled from me with a
cry.

The pirate craft raised its oars, slowing so
that when its prow struck us obliquely there was only a faint
shudder. I seemed to be alone in the middle of the ship, holding a
blood-stained sword in my hand. I could see the pirates standing
along the rail, their arms folded across their chests, almost as if
our ship were deserted and harmless, waiting for the grappling
hooks to draw us together. A few of them watched me, and
grinned.

“Jump, Kephalos!” I shouted, not looking
behind me. “Jump—Now!”

The pirates were almost ready to board, so I
turned my eyes and my swordpoint to them. Perhaps twenty men
prepared to leap across from ship to ship. Behind me, I heard some
object strike the deck with a heavy, muffled thump and then,
surprisingly a loud splash.

He had done it, after all. That was something
at least. Now I could try to purchase him a few moments’ grace so
that no one would impale him with a spear as he floundered clear of
the ship.

I glanced back and saw what had made that
thump. Kephalos’ purse lay beside the rail. He had abandoned it,
fearing perhaps that its weight would sink him. It gave me an
idea.

A few steps and I had it in my hand. Yes—it
was heavy enough to carry a man to the bottom like a stone. There
were pirates on the deck now and two or three of them thought to
rush me, but I slid the point of my sword through the purse strings
and swung it out over the side. These thieves understood well
enough, and stopped.

“There is enough gold in here to make ten men
rich all the days of their lives,” I shouted in Arabic—who could
know what tongue such as these would speak? “A step, a move, and it
goes to the fishes. Stay back!”

What could they do? I had only to let the
sword slip from my fingers and the gold was lost in the sea. A
pirate should, I thought, be a great respecter of gold. Let them
consider the matter carefully.

There was silence. I could hear splashing in
the water behind me—Kephalos was making good his escape. A few
minutes and he would be safe from these. The sharks might kill him,
or the nameless desert that stretched back from the shore, but not
these. I waited.

“Your life, Lord—for the gold, we give you
your life.”

Did they think I was so foolish as that? I
laughed at them—I was not even afraid. Strangely, a man on the
point of death hardly ever is.

The splashing faded. Good. I would keep my
implied contract, even if they did not. They could have the gold,
and I would show them how Tiglath Ashur, Son of Sennacherib, could
die.

I swung my arm around that they faced the
point of my sword. With a twitch, I cut the strings and Kephalos’
purse fell to the deck. The pirates jumped back, as if I had
attacked them.

“Now—come,” I said, quietly, between my
teeth. “See how many will make the journey to death with me.”

The war cry broke from my lips of its own
will. I charged the knot of men that stood closest to me, cutting
at them as if they were a stand of wheat. One I caught on the arm,
and the bright blood poured from his wound. The rest stumbled back,
astonished—afraid.

I laughed. The laughter boiled inside me at
these women, who feared death. I laughed—I. . .

Something happened. I felt a shock—no pain at
first, just a shock, as if the earth beneath my feet had all at
once shuddered with dread. Nothing more.

And then the pain came, welling up behind my
eyes. I felt suddenly as if I were made of iron. I sagged under the
weight of my own body. The light failed—sunset, as the air turned
red as blood.

And then blackness. More than
blackness—emptiness. I was falling through the empty black air. And
then. . .

Nothing.

VIII

“I still think we should kill him—now, while
he is quiet. He is dangerous. He fights like an animal.”

“You are only cross because he opened you up.
Why waste such a man? With those shoulders he will do very well on
the oar benches. He might last a year, this one.”

It was not this, but the sound of screaming
that brought me to myself.

I cannot say precisely how long I was
unconscious, but it could not have been more than a few minutes. I
awoke with my face against the deck, my head feeling as if it had
been split open. Everything hurt. I did not want to move. My left
eye remained resolutely shut, sealed up like the door of a crypt,
and I felt little enough inclination to force it open. What would
there have been to look at? There was a taste in my mouth as if
some small furred creature had crawled inside to die.

Gradually, as I lay there, as still as a
corpse, I became aware that something warm and sticky was trickling
over my ear. It was probably blood, I thought. Probably it had
crusted over my eye and that was why I couldn’t open it.

“Look at the mark on his palm!”

Someone had hold of my right arm. He was
pulling back my fingers as if displaying the claws of a dead lion.
I wished he would leave me in peace.

“Yes. That makes a difference.”

And always, somewhere in the background,
there were the screams. Who was screaming? And what were they
talking about, these men? Yet it seemed too much trouble to find
out. All I wanted was to lie there quietly and think about the pain
in my head.

And then I felt myself being pulled over onto
my back. It hurt such that I thought I would be sick.

“Throw some water in his face—get him on his
feet.”

The water was a blessing. It shocked me back
to life, and as I rubbed my face I discovered that my left eye was
now willing to open. There was a deep cut in the scalp over my ear
and the salt made it burn, but even this had the effect to reducing
the pain in my head to something like normal dimensions.

Getting to my feet was another matter. My
captors tried and I tried, but it was hopeless. My knees simply
would not lock. Finally we all settled for my sitting up and
supporting my head in my hands.

A wave of nausea passed through me and I
started to cough. At last I spat up a black clot of something,
about the diameter of a copper shekel, after which I felt
better.

It was then that I was able to observe where
all the screaming had been coming from—the pirates were amusing
themselves. They had tied one end of a rope around the surviving
sailor’s waist and the other end to our ship’s mast. The game was
to kick him into the sea, where the sharks could get at him, which
had probably been attracted to the spot by the smell of blood,
since the deck was clear of corpses. After a few minutes the
pirates would pull him out again, give him a few minutes to rest on
the deck and contemplate how much flesh was missing, and then throw
him back. It seemed they had repeated this process several times
already because the poor creature had grown remarkably tattered,
with great pieces pulled loose from his legs, particularly his
right thigh, and one foot completely gone, so that the deck was
stained red with his blood and he hardly seemed to know what was
happening to him anymore. He might even have been dead already.

I watched with no particular emotion. I did
not even feel pity. Why should I have? In a short time I would
probably be taking my own turn at the end of that rope.

“We do that to the ones who don’t fight,” one
of the pirates said, crouching beside me and showing me a smile
full of yellowed, broken teeth. He had a long scar that ran from
his right temple straight down into his beard, as if someone had
tried to hack him open with a mattock. “The ones without enough
spirit even to fight aren’t worth the trouble of sparing. Generally
they don’t last a month on the benches. You, on the other hand. .
.”

“That mark on your palm—where did you get
it?”

Another, the one who had rolled me over,
grasped my wrist and held my hand up before my face, as if he
imagined I had never seen it before.

“I was born with it,” I said, wondering what
difference it could possibly make.

“He is no good to us then,” he said. “Some
god has put his mark on him, whether for a curse or a blessing no
man can tell. But it is wise to be prudent. It is a pity.”

This respecter of prudence and of the gods
was remarkably thin, with glittering black eyes and a face pitted
over by the ravages of some disease. His beard consisted of no more
than a few irregularly scattered tufts of hair growing at peculiar
angles. In all he made an unpleasant impression, so that I had
little confidence in his mercy.

“Then let us throw him overboard,” suggested
my friend with the scar. “Perhaps the sharks will get him or, if he
lives, the desert, yet either way his god must hold us blameless of
his death. That is the best way—give him an empty waterskin that he
does not sink at once, then let the sea have him.”

This idea met with such approval that it was
immediately put into execution. I found myself being picked up by
the arms and legs and carried to the railing, where I was pitched
over like the dead goat that had been sacrificed at Mauza. I could
hear the pirates’ laughter behind me even before I hit the sea.

The waterskin struck me between the shoulder
blades as soon as I came back to the surface and I turned over and
grabbed it, clutching it to my breast with strengthless arms that I
might not slip back under and drown. They laughed still—I saw them,
standing at the ship’s rail above me, watching the sport—but I paid
them no heed. They were not important now, for I had remembered
that I wanted to live.

A few seconds to catch my breath and I kicked
out awkwardly, trying to swim. The shore seemed far away, part of
some other world, out of reach forever. I kicked again, and again,
but without any sensation of moving. Again I tried, attempting to
sustain the effort, and when I stopped to rest I found I had moved
at least out from beneath the ship’s shadow—perhaps it was merely
that the current had carried me a little. I let myself drift and
then tried again. By degrees it became easier.

It was fear of the sharks that drove me, even
more than the fear of death. I did not want to be rent to pieces,
to end as a few torn fragments floating in a cloud of blood until
the sea disbursed me to nothing. It seemed horrible beyond
imagining to die thus, unburied even by the thoughtless, wind-blown
dust. If I could make the land I would stretch out my bones there
with an easy mind, though my ghost might wander over this barren
place forever.

Yet even fear has its limits, and when I grew
weary enough not even the sharks frightened me.

At last, as I floated helplessly, my arms
stretched across the waterskin, which had just air in it enough to
keep my face above the surface of the water, a single black fin
approached from the left, wandering this way and that, as if it
could not decide about me, yet coming ever closer.

All I felt was annoyance. What am I to do
about this? I wondered. The shark rose a little in the water, so
that its back was visible, and very tentatively approached.

“Where shall I bite you?” it seemed to be
asking. “On the belly or along the ribs? Shall I take your
arm?”

The creature was so slow, almost leisurely,
that I actually felt insulted. At last it began to swim straight
for me, turning a little on its side as it drew close. In a passion
as much anger as fear, I lashed out, striking the thing on the
point of its snout with the back of my fist. It stopped abruptly,
turned straight about, and carved a deep trench in the water as it
sped away.